Life After Porn: Promiscuity, and His Promise
About the Life After Series
If you’re new here, Life After is a blog series featuring 15 women, 15 battles, and one powerful truth: there is life after. Through heartbreak, healing, and hard-won hope, Coach Jaleesa’s Happy Wife Happy Life is honored to help share their stories with the world.
If you’ve ever felt stuck in cycles you didn’t ask for—or struggled to believe freedom was possible—this story is for you.
There is hope. There is healing. And yes—there is life after.
Discovery
Honesty. Openness. Truth. Words that seem like a nightmare when asked to be open about my journey to sexual purity. However, I have realized time and time again, that God often will bring us out of our hardest struggles so that in turn we may be an encouragement to others. As I pour out some of the rawest, honest, and painful details of my life concerning sexual desires, my hope is that my story will encourage you, wherever you may be, that God is faithful to answer prayer and bring you through whatever battles you may be facing.
How does God break the cycle of porn addiction, masturbation, sleeping around, and heal the pains of a broken heart, rejection, and low self-esteem? Well to understand how I ended up this way, I have to give the background as to how I ended up here. As a child, between the ages of 5-7, I discovered masturbation, before I even knew what it was. I can’t remember the moment I first discovered it. I just remember that I liked the feeling it gave me. I knew it had to be wrong because I didn’t want my parents to find out. Fast forward to elementary school, and I remember seeing nude photos for the first time and found that the visual images aroused the desire to masturbate. A friend later introduced me to porn, and we would watch it together. Around age 12, I began watching porn on a regular basis.
At home, I didn’t really feel loved, and I began to think that what I saw in porn was love and that in order to show love, this is what I had to do. Now, my parents are very loving. They sacrificed so much to give me a better life than what they ever had, but both of my parents came from dysfunctional families, so they showed me love the best way they knew how. The problem was, oftentimes, I felt neglected. They didn’t talk or share as much in my younger years. My parents worked long hours, more than one job, in order to show their deepest love for me. They wanted me to succeed in ways they couldn’t, but missing out on time with mom and dad caused me to feel rejected. Since I didn’t feel the love I desired, I began to seek it with boys. I lost my virginity at just 12 years old to a boy I liked. What did he do? He told everyone at school about it, and I was called a slut and whore. People talked about me all the time and I sank into depression. I began sleeping around with boys because I was getting attention, even if it was the wrong kind. I believed such lies, that when I was molested at 13 by a 24-year-old married man, I thought that it was my decision, and consensual. I wasn’t raped, so I thought my consent made this okay. Now that I am older, I am disgusted that a grown man desired to be intimate with a child. I didn’t know my value, and I had such low self-esteem, I just thought I was asking for it since I had already been sleeping around at such a young age. Even worse, I can remember a boy telling me he wouldn’t date me because I wasn’t a virgin. This only added to my low self-esteem and depression.
Divine Intervention
I hated myself. As a result of the depression, I tried to commit suicide when I was 14. It was at this point that God intervened on my behalf. I remember crying to God in the hospital room that night. I said “God if you are real, then show me.” That’s all I could muster up to say in the early hours of the morning. The next morning, I woke up, and I knew immediately, that God did a miracle. I had such a weight of depression physically, but when I woke up that morning, that pain was gone. I remember smiling for the first time in a really long time. This was the start of God completely changing my life.
I wish I could tell you that I magically stopped watching porn, sleeping around, and masturbating, but my journey to being healed from my past, and sexual purity was only just beginning. After giving my life to the Lord, I knew I wanted to stop having sex and be pure, but I didn’t know how. Time and time again, I kept slipping back into the same cycle. I would watch porn, masturbate, or sleep around, then pray for forgiveness, ask God to help me stop, have a few months of being pure, and then bam! The cycle repeated itself. I started college, and I met a friend who would eventually become like a sister to me. I remember the night I finally opened up to my friend about my sexual past. I thought she would be disappointed in me and appalled by everything that I had done. To my surprise, she didn’t judge me. She opened up to me about her life and struggling with similar issues. You see, I had never known any Christian women who struggled with this. When I opened up to my mother, she couldn’t relate to my struggle, and I didn’t hear any women talking about the issue. I felt isolated in my struggle. One time, I even asked for prayer at a local megachurch, and the woman was so flabbergasted at the fact that as a woman, I struggled with porn addiction, that she didn’t really know what to say. Here I was running to the church, but the church made me feel that I was abnormal for struggling with this.
Man’s rejection/God’s protection
In college, I was growing in my faith, and watched God do some amazing things!....But I just couldn’t seem to get past my struggles. Since I hadn’t dealt with the rejection issues as a child, I kept getting attention from the wrong men. I thought I met someone my freshman year, but it turned out to be another man who just wanted to use me. I slept with him and never saw him afterwards. Later, I found out that he had a girlfriend and was mortified to realize that he cheated on her with me. This started a time in my life where I hated men and didn’t want to be used by them ever again. I met another person who I dated on and off. You see, we were not ‘officially’ a couple, but we acted like husband and wife. We slept together, were together all the time, he would drop me off at work and pick me up, and we were also dysfunctional. He and I both didn’t want commitment, but we liked the benefits of it, so we let this whatever you want to call it thing go on for a few years. I wanted to stop, but again, I didn’t know how. I can remember one day that I knew the Lord was telling me to stop and cut this man off, but it was so hard. I did, and from that day on, I stopped having sex. I wanted to live right and be pure. The problem was that I still struggled with porn addiction and masturbation through all of this.
I thought the next chapter of my life would be different. I met a man who loved the Lord, wanted nothing but God’s will, and was willing to date me and remain pure. During our relationship, I was afraid to be all of myself. My past still had an effect on me, and I was afraid to be honest with him about my sexual past. I did open up to him, and he accepted me for all of me. I was so happy to know that he didn’t judge me for my past. I thought this man would be the one for me, but it turns out that he had some struggles of his own. When he broke things off with me, I didn’t understand at the time. A while later, we were able to talk, and he shared that his struggle with homosexuality was the reason we couldn’t work out. This is a story for another time. Though I respected him for breaking things off knowing what he was going through, I still felt rejected yet again, by another man. Moreover, it was one thing to feel rejected, but now I was being rejected for who I am, a woman.
How does each story come together? Each part seems different, but they all played a piece in my struggle with sexuality as a Christian woman. I reached the point where I was fed up, and was ready to completely deal with my struggle, my past, and my disappointments once and for all. I decided to make the biggest move I could think of. I decided to go to counseling. It was here, that I was able to talk out, and deal with all of the “WHY” questions I had. Along with scriptures, I learned how to add practical things into my everyday life that would keep me from giving in to temptation. She taught me ‘think stoppers.’ I would do things like get up out of bed the moment I woke up so I wouldn’t masturbate. I would go for a run, think about scripture, call someone that was close to me when I was feeling tempted. The way to overcome my addictions was to plan ahead. I am a procrastinator at heart, so this was new to me. I sat down and wrote down every practical thing I could think of that would distract me from giving in to the desire to watch porn or masturbate when the temptation came….and boy did temptation come! The enemy doesn’t want us to be free. When I made the decision to be free and live a pure life, temptation arose every day after. I would have to make myself extremely exhausted during the day in order to be able to pass out when I went to bed so I wouldn’t give in to temptation. I began getting Christian literature that dealt with the topic of women and sexuality. I kept in the word, in prayer, and I kept doing these practical things to help keep me from giving in.
Falling Forward
Something that also kept the desire to be pure strong is that my counselor asked me every session if I had given in to temptation or not. I wanted to say no every time. I messed up a few times along the way, but I was falling forward, rather than falling back. What I mean by that is the number of times I fell to temptation grew fewer and fewer. I could see God’s hand in the process. Each month that passed, I still felt worried that I would fall again. God was changing my mindset to stop believing that I was going to fall into temptation again. I am here to testify, that I have not watched porn, or masturbated in over 2 years, nor have I been sexually active in over 5. I had struggled from as young as I can remember, until age 24. I am not saying that it’s been easy. It was so hard, and I never thought I could actually live pure after all I had been through and done. I still ‘desire’ to be intimate, but now that enough time has passed, I am more able to trust and rely on God’s strength to help me not give in. Furthermore, I began to understand my sexuality as a Christian woman. God gave me the desire to be intimate, but I didn’t know how to glorify God as a single woman. For years, I thought I had to ignore or suppress my feelings and desires to have sex. However, I began to learn that I glorify God in my singleness not by ignoring or suppressing these feelings, but by acknowledging them to God, and asking for His strength in not giving in to temptation. God made me a sexual being. He gave me these desires. I had such a hard time believing that, but it’s true. I mean look at the whole book of Song of Solomon! It’s filled with expressions of sexual pleasure between the husband AND wife. I read a book called “Pulling Back the Shades” By Dannah Gresh and Dr. Juli Slattery. They are Christian women, one of whom is a psychologist, and they wrote this book going into detail about everything that we as women struggle with sexually. One part in the book explained purity not as a ‘no,’ but rather, a ‘wait.’ Also, they mention that the goal of purity is not sexual repression. As mentioned before, God gave us these desires, and our desires are not sin. It’s how we deal with these desires that will either be giving in to sin or glorifying God. Not only has God brought me through this, but he has healed the pain of rejection I had from all of the men who came into my life. I have learned my value and worth. I’ve learned the power of forgiveness. My past is what it is….my past. It happened, and I realized that I can either choose to feel regret, anger, and bitterness, or I can forgive myself, forgive others, and allow God to use my stories as an opportunity to encourage someone else in their journey.
There is not a how-to process in a journey to purity. Mine is just one example. The specifics in how God brings you through your struggles will be different than mine, but I can promise you that if you cling to the hope we have in Christ, to His power to help you overcome ANYTHING, and the desire to live free of whatever bondage you may face….God will surely bring you through. It will not be easy, but it will be worth it. Overcoming my past, and dealing with my sexual addictions was very hard and painful. It was longer for me because I chose not to deal with it sooner, but I am so grateful that God has turned all of my ashes into beauty. The same healing and resurrecting power that God gave me to overcome, is available to you in your life! All he wants is for you to invite Him into your situation, so He can do what only He is able to do.
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